Combat Record - 59 Enemy Aircraft Destroyed (plus six additional shared victories)Unofficially Pokryshkin's tally was over 100 Aircraft Destroyed. However, the Soviet Air Force did not confirm kills whose wreckage could not be found.

Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin (1913 – 1985) was a Marshal of the Soviet Air Force. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union on three separate occasions.

Pokryshkin was the great tactician of the Soviet Air Force during the Second World War. He almost singlehandedly fought to change the obsolete Soviet tactics that were in place in 1941 when the war started. Going against the establishment and openly defying the party-approved combat doctrine almost cost him his career and possibly his life. After openly criticizing the official tactics that led to huge losses and teaching his fellow pilots new tactics he invented himself, he was grounded and scheduled to be court martialed. However the word of his inventions reached some superiors in Moscow, and instead of a court martial Pokryshkin was awarded and promoted. By the end of the war, his writings had been published and distributed to all Soviet pilots, and he toured fighter regiments extensively lecturing young pilots on his techniques.

In January 1943 his regiment converted to lend-lease Bell P-39 Airacobras, which despite a persistent myth the Soviets never used in the ground attack role. Soviet pilots liked this aircraft, and found it quite competitive with the Messerschmitt Bf-109 and superior to the Focke-Wulf FW-190 at the low air combat altitudes common on the Eastern Front. Pokryshkin really enjoyed the 37mm cannon's destructive firepower, and the 2 upper nose-mounted .50 caliber machine guns, synchronized to fire through the propellor (airscrew), in addition to the pair of .30 caliber machine guns mounted in each wing, outside the propellor arc and therefore unsynchronized. He claimed that the cannon's trigger, positioned at the top of the joystick, was impossible to push without moving the pilot's hand, which made the aircraft deviate from the gunsight, so finally he had his regiment's aircraft rigged so that a single button simultaneously fired cannon and machine guns. In his memoirs he describes many enemy aircraft immediately disintegrating upon being hit by the salvo.

Just another great P-39 Model by Hobby Master. Getting to be hard to find now.